T. Boyle - Drop City

Suddenly he was in a rage. It was all he could do to keep himself from just opening up on the place, blowing out the windows, making meat of the dogs as they came yowling and bewildered out of their houses, cutting down Howard Walpole in his greasy long johns and worn-out carpet slippers. How had he ever gotten himself into this mess? What had he been thinking? A woman-a good-looking woman, a stunner, with strong hands and a stronger back-advertises for a man? What kind of world was that? And how could he ever have expected anything other than heartbreak and humiliation out of the whole mess?

He was standing then, standing up to his full height and damn the subterfuge-he was going to march up to that cabin and bang on the door till it opened and demand an answer of her, right then and there: _Is it me or him? Me or him!__ But when he came up out of the bush he detected the faintest shadow of movement through the front room window, and before he could think or act the dogs were rushing at their chains in a froth of champing teeth and bitter startled yips and howls. Was there a face in the window? Was it her? Was it Howard? He fell to his hands in the liquefying mud and began a mad scrambling retreat even as he heard the door swing open on rusted hinges and Howard's voice ringing out, “Who's there?” and her voice answering, “It's probably a moose, that's all,” and Howard saying, apropos of what, Sess could only wonder, “Didn't I tell you? Didn't I?”

Two days later, at twelve noon on the dot, Howard Walpole's flat-bottomed boat planed round the gravel bar off the Boynton beach and drifted in on the crest of its own wake. Sess was standing there in the mud in his boots, just like Howard before him. He hadn't slept. He hadn't eaten. He was as hopeless and ragged and pie-eyed as a beggar on the streets of Calcutta. When the boat touched shore with a scrape of gravel and a single sharp cry from one of the gulls overhead, Pamela-she was wearing shorts and a T-shirt under a cotton jacket and a wide-brimmed floppy hat that masked her eyes so he couldn't gauge a thing-sprang out so lightly and gracefully it was as if a breeze had propelled her. He hung his head. Sucked in his breath. “Well?” he said.

She gave him a smile, she gave him that. “I've got to go back to Anchorage for a few days,” she said, and there was Howard, behind her, dragging the painter up the shore with the intention of looping it round any convenient boulder or tree stump.

Sess just looked at her. “Why?”

She stopped there, right in front of him, and she never flinched or looked away. “Why? To get my wedding dress, what do you think? And my sister, who's going to be my lone bridesmaid, and my mother-she's going to have to fly up from Arizona. I always did want to be a June bride.”

Still nothing. Still it wasn't sinking in. He was dangling in the wind, no more able or sentient than a river-run salmon split down the middle and hung out to dry.

A long moment ticked by, the longest moment of his life, and then she said, “How about the twenty-first, Sess? Will that work?”

Pris brought the cake all the way up from Anchorage in the back of her station wagon, and it was a cake the likes of which Boynton had never seen, at least not since the days of the gold rush, when all sorts of excess had bled in and out of the country: five tiers, alternating layers of pink and white glacé royal frosting, princess white cake inside and the plastic figurine of a veiled bride on top standing arm-in-arm with a bearded trapper in a plaid shirt. Pamela's mother arrived by bush plane, two hops and a jump out of the Fairbanks airport, no weather to speak of, her smile uncrimped and blazing like a second sun on everybody in town, even the bush crazies and the Indians. And Pamela herself, established with Pris in the back room of Richard Schrader's cabin to get into her makeup and the white satin gown trimmed with Brussels lace her mother had worn on a similarly momentous occasion two weeks after the Japanese let loose on Pearl Harbor, couldn't seem to stop smiling either and didn't want to. “Give me a drag on that,” she said, fixed before the mirror and gesturing at the mirror image of the pale white tube of a Lark that jutted from her sister's lower lip.

“What?” Pris said, feathering her hair with a tortoiseshell comb, both her arms lifted and bare.

“A drag. Your cigarette.”

“You? But you don't smoke.”

She was smiling past herself, her eyes in the mirror fastening on her sister's, and it was like being ten years old all over again. “Today I do. Today I'm going to do everything.”

And then they were gathering in the communal yard that wedded Richard's cabin to Sess's shack, most of the errant junk-the worn-out tires, rusted machine parts, discarded antlers, crates, fuel drums and liquor bottles, fishnets, tubs, traps, derelict Ski-Doos and staved-in boats-having been hauled around the far side of the buildings, out of sight for the time being. Sess was in a herringbone jacket he'd borrowed for the occasion and a tie so thin it was like a strip of ribbon, and the white of his shirt could have been whiter and the sleeves of the jacket longer, but this was no fashion show and the photographers from _Vogue__ seemed to have stayed home on what was turning out to be a fine, sunshiny afternoon. The bride and her sister had shared the better part of a pint of crème de menthe as well as half a dozen Larks, and Pamela was feeling no pain as she picked her way down the weather-blasted steps at the back of Richard Schrader's cabin and into the void left by her peripatetic father.

Since there was nobody to give the bride away, Sess had asked Tim Yule, the oldest man in town, to serve in that capacity, and now Tim looped his arm through hers and they started across the yard to the strains of “Here Comes the Bride” as rendered on Skid Denton's harmonica. Tinny, wheezy, flat, the music insinuated itself into the texture of the day, riding the refrigerated breeze coming up off the river, orchestrating the rhythm of the gently rocking trees. Tim smelled of bourbon and aftershave, and his boots shone with gobs of wet black polish. Stooped and white-haired, with a dripping nose and cheeks aflame with drink, he led her at a pace so stately it was practically a crawl. There was a murmur from the crowd. All her senses were alive. She didn't feel faint or nervous or sad, but just eager-eager and vigorous, ready to get on with the rest of her life. She'd waited twenty-seven years and there was no going back now.

Smoke from the barbecue pit crept across the yard. Every dog in town howled from the end of its chain, goaded by the sour repetitive wheeze of the harmonica and maddened by the wafting aroma of moose and caribou ribs, of broiled salmon and steaks and sausage lathered in barbecue sauce. At the far end of the yard, derealized in the sun off the river, Sess stood waiting for her with Richard Schrader, his best man, at his side. Her mother was there, just to the left of him, tear-washed and clinging to Pris as if she were trying to pull herself up out of a pit of shifting sand.

Wetzel Setzler, proprietor of the Three Pup and the general store, postmaster, mayor, undertaker and local representative of Prudential Life, presided over the ceremony. Three-quarters of the population of Boynton stood there amidst the weeds and wildflowers, bottles of beer and plastic cups of bourbon and vodka clutched in their hands, to watch her take the vows in her white heels with the smears of mud lapping up over the toes in a fleur-de-lis pattern. She saw Richie Oliver in the back of the press, hand in hand with a plain-faced woman in a red shirt and jeans, and Howard Walpole too, good sports, good sports all, though she could have done without Howard. The harmonica left off and the silence blew in. Even the dogs fell quiet. She could hear the river sliding over its riffles and sinking into its holes. Do you take this man? I do, she said, I do.